Sam Altman – OpenAI Founder Reveals His Writing System

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:00.630

totally i think i you know i try to like watch people like very different walks of life use chat GPT and it's always eliminating

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:10.870

so i watched two students use it to kind of like help with their homework do their homework to be honest recently and one of them basically just like put in their thing and wrote their whole essay and i was like appalled because i kind of knew that that was a theoretical thing

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:29.870

that people were doing that you know significant volume or whatever but you hear about it but like to like watch someone just like do that and then get an essay that was you know bad but like passable out of it was like that was like a real like what have we done moment i was

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:48.150

like visceral in a way that you know i just hadn't i'd never seen someone do it before

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:52.470

and then i watched someone else use it in a very different more interactive way to try to do something more like what you're talking about which is like i have this idea i can't quite articulate it i'm kind of stuck let me get unblocked and let me generate a bunch more ideas and

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:09.270

the thing that came out of that was far better than i think anybody would have done on their

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:14.150

own and i was like reflecting a lot on that and the first question was like a bad question like if you can just put something in and get a super interesting or that i thought not a super passable response i i think we're just like asking people to do the wrong thing whereas if

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:33.310

it's something that like gets them to want to think about a question differently and use the tool to help them get somewhere they wouldn't have gotten on their own that's really interesting

David Perell (Host) 01:44.990

how do you use chatgpt every day

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:47.870

i used to only use it for a few things and both chatgpt has gotten better and i figured out how to use it more and so the cool thing now is i really do use it as a general purpose tool and i hope that a few years from now when you asked i'll say i use it for most things that i

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:03.070

do like every few months i find new ways to use it new ways to incorporate it's it's obviously still terribly integrated into most people 's workflows but that's just going to get better and better

David Perell (Host) 02:17.130

when you're talking to friends you're like you should use chat GPT for this what are the themes that you're telling them to do

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:25.980

i mean the thing that i hear about from my friends that they love it for the most is like computer programming help in some way or other and the number of people who say that's like transformed my life yeah i mean like it's very gratifying here it's a lot of fun like that there

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:43.670

are other things where people say it's like change the way my kids learn or teachers say change the way teachers that's great too and but i and then there's like incredible examples with healthcare the way people use this for creative work but the programming ones like near and

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:57.990

dear to my heart many of my friends are programmers so i hear about that a lot

David Perell (Host) 03:01.510

email yeah you do a lot of writing by email and you've

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:06.550

i do a lot of like very short email like i do a lot of like seven word

David Perell (Host) 03:11.150

emails and how is chatgpt helped you with that

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:18.310

it's super good at summarizing long emails that like most long emails honestly i just stopped i don't even read but if i have to read one it's super good at like chatgpt 's ability to effectively summarize long pieces of content like a really long thread or whatever very

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:35.790

impressive

David Perell (Host) 03:36.790

yeah it was just i got a tour of the library here

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:39.150

yeah that's cool space by the way nice job i like that space a lot it's beautiful

David Perell (Host) 03:43.110

thank you and the i saw the encerto on the wall by nassim taleb and he says that basically the definition of a good book is one that can't be summarized and maybe there's an equivalent

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:55.190

for GPT there's a really interesting there's a really interesting thing there which is that at some sense it took me like years to really understand this but ilya would always say that what these models are really about is compression and we're going to go figure out how to

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:13.480

compress as much knowledge as possible and that's we're going to make AI compression is like the secret to intelligence and that was like i had to meditate on that for a long time i'm sure i still don't fully understand it but there's something dee there

David Perell (Host) 04:34.400

i was talking to your assistant she said that you think very clearly you're like a man of few words but when you say something it's it's really you're clear on what you want and you've really crystallized your message

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:45.630

i guess the part of that that resonates is i do try to like get at the essence of a problem and i i definitely don't like when other people communicate unclearly